Made In Qatar Exhibition To Promotes Qatari Exports

Posted on September 15, 2016

Qatar seeks to promote exports other than oil and natural gas through the Made in Qatar Exhibition, but what else does the country produce?

In a bid to promote and encourage locally produced products both at home and abroad, the Qatar Chamber organizes the Made in Qatar exhibition on a yearly basis, presenting Qatari products and companies to the world.

The exhibition can be seen as a step in the course towards achieving Qatar’s National Vision 2030, which aims to restructure the country’s economy from oil and gas dependency, and to rely more on other locally produced exports and services.

While oil and gas still amount to 82.8% of all exports, Qatar is becoming more reliant on the trade of other commodities, like plastics, fertilizers, aluminum, iron, organic and inorganic chemicals, as well as mechanical and nautical machinery. However, Qatar’s top ten exports accounted for 97.6% of the country’s overall global shipments, and smaller industries for the rest.

To introduce the lesser sold products abroad, the 2016 Made in Qatar exhibition will be held in Riyadh, KSA, this upcoming November. It will be the first time the exhibition crosses borders, and hopes to attract the attention of Saudi buyers and investors to Qatari products usually undermined or unnoticed.

In 2015, the total amount of Qatar’s exports had a net worth of $78 billion, 40.7% down from the previous year and a 31.9% decrease since 2011.

To tackle this, Qatar will have to support other industries with both production and sales.

The aim is to attract double the amount of visitors from last years exhibition, which was 250 companies, to fill the 10,000 square meter space at the Riyadh International Convention and Exhibition Centre, from November 6 until November 9.

Based on statistics from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, Qatar is the world’s richest country in terms of GDP per capita, with a total Gross Domestic Product of $333.9 billion (as of April 2016), only 23.4% of which are accounted for by exports.

Top buyers of Qatari exports

Asian countries are the biggest buyers of Qatari exports, where 81.8% of all shipments end up, while European importers bought 11.9%, followed by Africa (2%), North America (1.5%), and Latin America and Caribbean countries (1.1%).

In relation to Qatar’s population of 2.2 million people, the $78 billion generated from exports in 2015 translates to roughly $35,500 for every resident in the country.